Students leap from upper floor of Allston building to escape fire; one critically injured
A Boston University student was critically injured yesterday after he and another person leaped from an upper floor window in a three-story house engulfed by flames in Allston, according to a fire official at the scene.
That man and seven other BU students who were in the house were taken to area hospitals.
Flames rose high in the air as the two-alarm blaze gutted the building at 84 Linden St. at 7 a.m., destroying the top floor and leaving gaping, charred holes in the roof and walls.
“I saw a couple of the students, black as can be with soot,’’ said Steve MacDonald, a spokesman for the Boston Fire Department. “Everything is burned away.’’
MacDonald said the cause of the fire is under investigation. He did not know whether the building, listed with the city’s Assessing Department as a single-family house, had working smoke detectors.
The house was so badly damaged that officials will likely rely on interviewing the residents to determine what sparked the blaze, MacDonald said,
“To have this great volume of fire at 7 in the morning, something had to have happened,’’ he said, standing behind yellow police tape.
The building, which sustained $500,000 worth of damage, will have to be leveled because the fire toppled its staircases and eviscerated the structure, MacDonald said. A building inspector was expected to meet with the owner yesterday and determine whether the house will be boarded up or demolished immediately, he said.
“We couldn’t win the building,’’ MacDonald said. Firefighters had seen the smoke billowing up from their firehouse a few blocks away, he said.
MacDonald said he doubted residents would be allowed to enter the building to gather their belongings.
Boston University spokesman Colin Riley said the school’s administrators are in contact with the displaced students to help them find housing, he said.
“We will be in touch with the students and offer them assistance as requested or needed,’’ Riley said.
Firefighters hosed the house for hours, leaving long icicles on hanging on trees, 4 feet of water in the basement, and a slushy stream of snow and water gushing down the street.
Erin Kelly, 19, who was staying in an apartment across the street said she heard somebody call for help. She rushed to the window and looked across the street.
“I heard a guy saying ‘I got you, bro, I got you,’ ’’ she recalled. Then she saw a man and a woman jumping from a second-floor window.
She said saw the man, who was wearing pajamas, jump first. After he landed, he lay unconscious on the ground, Kelly said, until a man in boxers dragged him away from the roaring flames.
Then a young woman with blonde hair, wearing shorts and a tank top, leaped from the window into the arms of the man in boxers.
“I saw her on the stretcher after,’’ said Kelly, a student at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. “They were covered in smoke, they were all black faced.’’
From her apartment one street over, Pranee Srikuam, 50, saw the fire reach above the five-story building that blocks her view of the burned house.
“The fire was so very high,’’ she said.
Sunjae Won, who lives in a multifamily home next door, said he awoke at 7 a.m. to blaring sirens and ran outside to see the neighboring house clouded by thick black smoke. The heat of flames raging from the second floor warped and peeled the vinyl siding on his house, Won said.
“The whole building was engulfed,’’ he said. “I saw the man [who jumped] in a stretcher and the ambulance took him away.’’
Boston University senior Rick Christos, 21, who lives directly across the street, said the residents are his friends and he saw them taken away by ambulance as flames poured out the windows. He said the residents, whose names were not released, were all sophomores and juniors in college.
Standing beside him, his friend who declined to give his name, stared up at the blackened, mangled roof.
“You can’t really tell, but there was once a third floor for the house,’’ he said. “You really can’t tell anymore.’’
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